A former Pentagon information analyst, Ana Belén Montes, an American of Puerto Rican origin, was released this Saturday from a prison in Texas, after serving 21 years of detention for a 25-year sentence, for espionage for Cuba, said the Bureau of Prisons.
Montes, who pleaded guilty to the charge, thereby avoiding a jury trial, was considered the highest-ranking U.S. official ever proven to have spied for Cuba. “She knew everything about Cuba,” said an intelligence official at the time.
Formally, Montes, then 45, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage after she was accused of using her position as an official of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to leak information to Havana, both through contacts with Cuban officials, clandestine trips to the island or the use of sophisticated messaging systems.
The woman began working for the DIA in 1985 and quickly rose to become the agency’s top Cuba analyst. During the trial, prosecutor Ronald L. Walutes explained to the judge that Montes also received coded messages from Havana via shortwave radio, which were later decoded on a laptop.
Montes was arrested on September 21, 2001, directly in her office at the Pentagon, 10 days after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and shortly before the United States invaded Afghanistan. Her lawyer, Platos Cacheris, a leading specialist in espionage cases, stressed that she had fully cooperated.
At the sentencing hearing, Montes, who was born on a military base in the then Federal Republic of Germany, argued that she had obeyed her conscience and that the United States policy toward Cuba was cruel and unfair. “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it,” she said.
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When sentencing her, Judge Ricardo Urbina affirmed that she put her fellow American citizens and the “nation as a whole” at risk, for which he decided that Montes be placed under five years of probation, with restricted Internet access and the prohibition of working for governments and contacting foreign agents without permission.
Authorities have not reported whether she will remain in the United States or fly to Puerto Rico, where she has family.
Cuba never commented on Montes’ work. Just at the beginning of the process, then Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said that he felt “deep respect and admiration” for her.
Wow! 20 years! Amazing….